“I’ll have that brownie tomorrow”

In Milan, outside of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, there is a street artist who paints copies of Leonardo da Vinci’s famed fresco “The Last Supper.” All day long, tourists stop and bargain over replicas large and small, framed or on paper that’s curling a bit at the edges. Over the course of a year, I imagine he sells the image hundreds, even thousands, of times. It strikes me that this guy may be the one person on the planet who has done more last suppers than I have.

“Maybe just this last one,” I’ll say, reaching for a brownie or lifting the phone to order a pizza. Each “last” has something special about it, of course, something that allows me to justify the treat to myself. Maybe the bakery is famous for its brownies, or the pizza is reputed to be the best in town.

Sometimes, I’m the special circumstance—typically when I’m feeling worn out after a particularly difficult day at the office. “Just this one last time,” I rationalize, as I head to the vending machine for a snack. “To tide me over.”

Tomorrow, to my thinking, is always a fresh new day, a day when I won’t find the brownie, pizza and vending machine candy bars so tempting. The me in my tomorrow is always attractive, confident and living a great life. What use would she have for a brownie? Indeed, with all of her riches, how could she—the magnanimous me of my future—begrudge the more pathetic me of the present this one tiny little treat?

For years, as my weight went up and down, that is how I thought. I ate scores of “last” treats, sometimes virtuously giving my tomorrow self a leg up by shoving the rest of the cake down the garbage disposal or begging a coworker to take that final box of Thin Mints off my hands. Every tomorrow carried the promise that today would finally be the day.

And you know what? One day it was.

I started an eating plan. I began going to the gym. I watched with unbridled glee as the numbers on the scale steadily dropped. I went into stores simply to try on the clothes, peeking again and again at the ever-smaller sizes on the tags, each time feeling as if I were unwrapping a really terrific Christmas present.

I even kept it up. I made sure to watch what I ate. I became a bit of an athlete—a gym rat and a cyclist. I started feeling like a thin person and so began to behave like one and eat like one.

Then I got pregnant. The problem wasn’t the pregnancy, exactly. I felt fine, and thinking about my baby’s health inspired me to make good food choices. With the help of a heart-rate monitor, I even kept up with my Spin classes until the week before I went into labor. I gained a healthy amount of weight, delivered a beautiful, wondrous baby boy and fell madly in love with him.

The problem came three or four months later, when the numbers on the scale stopped dropping. There was no excuse for still wearing my maternity clothes, but I hadn’t worked my way back into my “thin” clothes yet. Instead, I was stuck with the same transitional clothing I had worn years before, when I had first begun to lose weight—cheap, unattractive pieces bought on sale and meant to serve me only until I reached my goal.

I felt fat.

Add in a baby who didn’t sleep (I swear he was awake the entire month of March) and a husband who was searching frantically for a job after his firm was taken over in a merger, and what do you get? A woman who was sure she needed a brownie.

Indeed, I was sure I needed several. There it was again, that magical chorus: Just this last one. Walks with the baby happened to take me past the famed brownie bakery. Morning was my son’s best time of day, so I would meet friends for breakfast, generously granting myself the blueberry pancakes. And bacon. And hash browns. This one time.

It was easy to rationalize the first additional pound or two as a glitch or a slight misstep. And so began the second refrain of the familiar chorus: Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I would get back on track with my eating and everything would be fine.

My son was coming up on his first birthday when I went to the park with a friend whose kids were preschoolers. As we watched them play and fuss over the baby, she told me that her boss had criticized her “rather shabby” wardrobe in her annual review earlier that week. “But I still haven’t lost this baby weight,” she sighed. “And I don’t want to buy new suits until I do.”

I looked at her children clambering on the jungle gym. At what point, I wondered, does baby weight become plain old weight? I realized the future was now. In the last month or so, I’d eaten about two dozen “last” brownies, at least three “last” big breakfasts and more “last” bowls of pasta than I cared to count. At this rate, the me of tomorrow was not in fact going to be attractive and confident and happy. She was certainly not going to be slim. She would be sitting on this bench three years from now, waiting for the baby weight to miraculously disappear.

Over a lifetime of eating, whether I’ve been heavy or not, I realized there had never actually been one “last” anything. Even in the heady rush of losing weight, I’d let myself have the occasional ice cream cone at the beach or an exquisite bowl of homemade fettuccine—treats I would then accommodate by eating a little less or cycling a little more the next day. With a good 40 to 50 years of life ahead of me, did I truly believe that if I refused to eat that magical “last” brownie on any day, I would never get another shot at one? Did I think that eventually I would find myself transformed into a thin but slightly sad octogenarian who had deprived herself of what she craved for so long that she couldn’t even remember what a brownie tasted like?

I began to think I’d been a bit of a sap, like the awkwardly eager kid in third grade who believes in Santa Claus for a tad too long. I was gullible, it seemed, when it came to food. So the next day, as I neared the bakery, I allowed myself a luxurious thought: I can have those brownies anytime. Indeed, there was nothing stopping me. Every day, for the rest of my life, I could have one of those brownies. And I pushed the stroller on past the door.

I became the Scarlett O’Hara of food. “Tomorrow is another day—I can have it then,” I would say airily when I encountered some especially toothsome morsel. And somehow that seemed fine, because I really could. Occasionally, I did.

I even did the unthinkable. As the baby weight started to come off, I began keeping chocolate at home. I had always told myself I couldn’t be trusted around chocolate, but my new mind-set required me to feel reassured that, if I wanted some chocolate, I could have it. So I filled a bowl with Hershey’s Kisses and left it on the kitchen table. Doing this posed two major problems: (1) I saw them and wanted them at least a million times a day, and (2) my husband ate them. When I observed the number of foil-wrapped chocolates diminishing, I worried I wouldn’t get my share and began eating them, too.

So after my husband and I polished off the bowl, I tried a different tactic. I bought a single Toblerone and put it in the back of my sock drawer. This seemed like a good idea because (1) I rarely look in the back of my sock drawer and (2) neither does my husband; plus, (3) although my husband has been known to arrange entire vacations around a gelateria in Rome that sells a lovely flavor of chocolate-orange, he is perhaps the one person in the world who couldn’t care less about a Toblerone bar.

My new system hasn’t worked perfectly. After all, I may be gullible, but I’m no fool. After a certain number of chocolate promises (“It will still be there tomorrow!”), one has to eventually pony up some of the actual item. Before I came to this realization, I once ate an entire jumbo-sized Toblerone in a sitting. Later, I realized I could break off a triangle here and there and it would be fine.

Also, my socks smell vaguely of chocolate.

I do sometimes feel silly about this state of affairs. (Should a grown woman have to hide a Toblerone—from herself?) Nevertheless, that chocolate bar has become my insurance plan. Now that I don’t have to worry about a future without chocolate, I can keep other desserts at home, even types my husband will eat. And now the pounds (mostly) stay off.

After all, there will always be another brownie, and it will be rich and chocolaty, gooey and wonderful. But there will never again be this one glorious sunny day. So I wake up and pull on a pair of my prepregnancy jeans, which I can now zip up. Then I take my son to the park, where we will run and play and laugh. Today.

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